"I have always believed that motivation is a gift to be shared with everyone. Over the years I have read literally thousands of books and articles on the subject. I have come to the conclusion that inspiration is an art that breeds familiarity in every message - a constant reinforcement to our own truth within."

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Never have I seen the American public so disgusted with our Congress, Wall Street and the large corporations. Partisan politics, negative campaigning and seemingly no control over big business is literally sickening everyone. I plead with you to lead the way in cleansing a system that is totally out of control.

Americans are not only fed up with the greed, the lies and the cheating but they are angry. Please serve as a beacon light to change a system that so begrudgingly accepts change.

150 years ago, British historian Thomas Macaulay made this dire prediction for America, “Your civilization will be destroyed in the 20th century, as Rome was in the 5th century. But the huns and vandals which will destroy you will come from within, from your own institutions.” Yes, I know this is the 21st century but we had better wake up and demand that our Congress start putting the country first or his prediction could come true.

J. Paul Getty many years ago said, “I fear that unless there are many drastic changes in both basic philosophies and actual practices in every sector of human existence, our society will deteriorate and decline. It may well be wracked with upheavals far greater than any in previous history. It could, and I do not take the possibility lightly, be totally destroyed.”

I now ask you, will you just read this and delete it or will you try to do something about it? It has been said that nobody makes a greater mistake than someone who did nothing because he could do only a little. Please contact your congressman and demand change or vote them out of office.

I have traveled in 90 countries throughout the world and fully realize there is no better place to live but if we truly want to make this a better place to live we should follow Gandhi’s advice, “We must be the change we wish to see.”

When I was visiting Auschwitz I was appalled by seeing what one human being could do to another and thought how could this be possible. As I was leaving I saw a small plaque which gave me the answers, it said, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference.” We no longer can be indifferent to the ills of our society. Always remember when truth is in danger, silence equals guilt.

Great social transformation such as the end of slavery, the women’s and Civil Rights movements and the end of colonial rule all began with public awareness and engagement. Political leaders followed rather than led. A few courageous and committed people fed up with the system brought about the change. I sincerely hope that you will be stimulated to do something constructive and demand that we return to the principles that made this country the best in the world.

The system in Washington, D.C. and the large corporations in this country are corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interest groups to benefit the very few at the expense of the many. William Bennett in his book, “Death of Outrage” said, “The leader must be whole, he cannot have his public character be honest and his private character be dishonest.” We are to blame for many of our current problems because we have not demanded enough from those in powerful positions.

All of us Americans have a duty to end the corruption, greed, ineptness, and cronyism that have dominated the political and corporate world for far too many years.

What we desperately need today on all fronts are men and women willing to stand up for decency, truth, integrity, morality, law and order and who will respond to their conscience even when it is unpopular to do so – especially when it is unpopular to do so.

So now the question is, can we change a sick system and the answer is emphatically YES but only if we are vigilant, committed, disciplined, determined, and courageous enough to demand good ethics and honorable leadership.

The idea of saviors has been built into our entire culture. We have learned to look to stars, leaders, and experts in every field, thus surrendering our own strength, demeaning our own ability and causing us not to act when we see incompetence, dishonesty, and injustices.

Abraham Lincoln warned us when he said, “At what point is the approach of danger to be expected, if it is to reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot – we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

I recently read a quote in Oswald Chambers's classic devotion, My Utmost For His Highest: "The surf that distresses the ordinary swimmer produces in the surf-rider the super-joy of going clean through it." As I thought about this idea in light of the current economic distress and bleak news stories, I realized that we all have a choice to make. We can choose to let the current overtake us and drag us down. Or we can choose to ride the crest of the wave and soar through these challenging times, allowing God to teach us valuable lessons and turn our focus to where it needs to be.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

What filmmaker has had five movies open number one at the box office in the last four years? Spielberg, Tarantino, Scorsese? No. This record belongs to Tyler Perry, one of the biggest names in the movie business. Yet most Americans have never heard of him.

His eight films have grossed more than $418 million, one of the highest average grosses per film in the industry. And they're just part of Perry's multi-million-dollar entertainment empire.

What has made Perry guaranteed box office gold is his devoted audience: largely African-American, church-going, working class and female.

Long ignored by Hollywood, they come to see something they can't get anywhere else: inspirational stories about people like themselves, and to laugh at characters like his "Madea," the wise-cracking grandmother played by Perry himself.

Click on this link for this 60 Minutes Interview with the amazing Tyler Perry:

Nearly every American achiever has been impacted at some time in their life by the wisdom of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.

As a young boy, Peale faced a fight against strong inferiority feelings when growing up. Over the years he developed and refined the message that anyone could put the principles of positive thinking and strong faith into practice and improve upon their own life dramatically.

At age 34, Peale accepted a call to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he remained for 52 years as one of New York City's most famous preachers. Membership grew from 600 when he arrived to well over 5,000 today.

In 1945, Dr. Peale, his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale, and Rayond Thornburg, a Pawling, New York businessman founded Guideposts Magazine. With little money and a strong vision they managed to raise $1,200 from Frank Gannett, founder of the Gannett newspaper chain, J. Howard Pew, the Philadelphia industrialist and Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Guideposts was designed to be a non-denominational forum for people - both celebrities and ordinary folk - to relate their inspirational stories to provide a spiritual life to all readers. Today, the 48 page, full-color magazine under the direction of Ruth Stafford Peale is the 13th largest paid circulation magazine in the country with a circulation of over 4 million.

Peale put his gifted writing skills to work over the years. His fourth book "The Power of Positive Thinking" was published in 1952 and has sold nearly 20 million copies and has been printed in 41 different languages. Peale completed what has been called his all-time inspirational best seller at age 54. He was the author of 46 inspirational books including "The Art of Living," "A Guide to Confident Living," "The Tough-Minded Optimist," and "Inspiring Messages for Daily Living."
For 54 years, Peale's weekly radio program, "The Art of Living," was on the air. His sermons were said to be mailed to over 750,000 people per month and in 1964 a movie was made of his life entitled "One Man's Way."

Peale also co-founded "The Horatio Alger Association," with educator Kenneth Beebe in 1947 dedicated to recognizing and honoring contemporary Americans who have achieved success and excellence in the face of adversity.

The Guideposts family of non-profit organizations includes the Peale Center, the Positive Thinking Foundation and Guideposts Publications. Their purpose is to be the world leader in communicating positive, faith-filled principles that empower people to reach their maximum personal and spiritual potential.

On Christmas Eve of 1993, Dr. Peale left us to meet his maker at the ripe age of 95 years old. His message of positive thinking, strong faith and helping others achieve their true potential will continue to live on with us well into the new millennium.Taken from "The American Dreams by James R. Bickford

Click on this link for this interesting interview about how Dr. Peale got his positive thinking message to the secular masses.

God reveals himself in mysterious ways. If you pay attention, you may hear his voice.

A baby was drowning in the pool. Why was I the only one to jump in?

By Escott Brostrom, Rock Island, Illinois

On a hot summer sunday afternoon, my wife and I had been invited to a swimming party at the home of some friends. With our two children in the care of my grandmother, Cherie and I felt as free as the breeze. As I stood on the diving board, I paused to look up into the serene sky.But then a frantic voice rose above the party din. At the far end of the pool a woman was screaming. “the baby!” I heard her cry. “he’s at the bottom of the pool!”No one was doing anything to help. People just stood and stared at her. Confused, I searched the length of the pool and saw what I thought might be a motionless form beneath the water. I dived in—and a baby was there. I hurriedly swept him off the bottom and soon laid him on the deck. He’d turned blue…no breath. I began CPR. Dear God, help me do it right.At last the little boy coughed. a short breath came, then another. he would live.An ambulance was called, for safety’s sake. While we waited, I couldn’t help asking the others, “Why did you ignore the woman when she said the boy was drowning?”A friend answered, “none of us understood her, scott.”“What do you mean? even at the far end I could hear her yelling about the baby.”“But she’s Mexican. none of us understood her Spanish.”“Spanish? I heard her yell in English.”“We didn’t. All we heard was Spanish.”“It’s true,” said the woman’s daughter. “Mama can’t speak a word of English.”“And I don’t understand a word of Spanish,” I said.

Friday, August 6, 2010

"Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

2. Why did you write Outliers?

I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

3. In what way are our explanations of success "crude?"

That's a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don't lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we've been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that's the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.

4. Can you give some examples?

Sure. For example, one of the chapters looks at the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930's to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Now, you can call that a coincidence. Or you can ask—as I do—what is about being Jewish and being part of the generation born in the Depression and having parents who worked in the garment business that might have something to do with turning someone into a really, really successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a huge amount about why someone reaches the top of that profession by asking those questions.

5. Doesn't that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual's control?

I don't mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I'm not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there's a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

6. What's the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?

It's probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it's something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.

7. Wait. Does this mean that there are some airlines that I should avoid?

Yes. Although, as I point out in Outliers, by acknowledging the role that culture plays in piloting, some of the most unsafe airlines have actually begun to clean up their act.

In Tipping Point, you had an entire chapter on suicide. In Blink, you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting—and now plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?

Yes! I'm a frustrated thriller writer! But seriously, there's a good reason for that. I think that we learn more from extreme circumstances than anything else; disasters tell us something about the way we think and behave that we can't learn from ordinary life. That's the premise of Outliers. It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

9. How does this book compare to Blink and The Tipping Point?

It's different, in the sense that it's much more focused on people and their stories. The subtitle—"The Story of Success"—is supposed to signal that. A lot of the book is an attempt to describe the lives of successful people, but to tell their stories in a different way than we're used to. I have a chapter that deals, in part, with explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I'm not interested in anything that happened to him past the age of about 17. Or I have a chapter explaining why Asian schoolchildren are so good at math. But it's focused almost entirely on what the grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great grandparents of those schoolchildren did for a living. You'll meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.

10. What was your most memorable experience in researching Outliers?

There were so many! I'll never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who might be the smartest man in the world. I've never been able to feel someone's intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking—as I hope becomes apparent in "The Trouble with Geniuses" chapter. I also went to south China and hung out in rice paddies, and went to this weird little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one ever has a heart attack, and deciphered aircraft "black box" recorders with crash investigators. I should warn all potential readers that once you get interested in the world of plane crashes, it becomes very hard to tear yourself away. I'm still obsessed.

11. What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

1. Believing fundamentally that this life is the only one, modern people have developed no long-term vision. So there is nothing to restrain them from plundering the planet for their own immediate ends and from living in a selfish way that could prove fatal for the future. How many more warnings do we need, like this one from the former Brazilian Minister for the Environment, responsible for the Amazon rain forest?
• Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion. We are demolishing, poisoning, destroying all life-systems on the planet. We are signing IOUs our children will not be able to pay…We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead.
2. Our society is obsessed with youth, sex, and power, and we shun old age and decay. Isn’t it terrifying that we discard old people when their working life is finished and they are no longer useful? Isn’t it disturbing that we cast them into old people’s homes, where they die lonely and abandoned?
3. How sad is it that most of us only begin to appreciate our life when we are on the point of dying.
4. Our lives are monotonous, petty, and repetitive, wasted in the pursuit of the trivial, because we seem to know of nothing better.
We smother our secret fears of impermanence by surrounding ourselves with more and more goods, more and more things, more and more comforts, only to find ourselves their slaves. All our time and energy is exhausted simply maintaining them.
5. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
Discipline is to do what is appropriate or just; that is, in an excessively complicated age, to simplify our lives.
Peace of mind will come from this.
6. There are things that every person is sent to earth to realize and to learn. For instance, to share more love, to be more loving toward one another. To discover that the most important thing is human relationships and love and not materialistic things.
7. Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood and used, can often turn out to be an unexpected source of strength. In the biographies of the masters, you will often find that had they not faced difficulties and obstacles, they would not have discovered the strength they needed to rise above them.
8. In our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence. In fact many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying that goes, “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”
9. Generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity; mediation, on the other hand, is the way to bring us back to ourselves, where we can really experience and taste our full being, beyond all habitual patterns. Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing, and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.
10. Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain. Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Buddha said, “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
11. Shantideva said: “Whatever joy there is in this world all comes from desiring others to be happy, and whatever suffering there is in this world all comes from desiring myself to be happy.
Dalai Lama says: “If you try to subdue your selfish motives—anger and so forth—and develop more kindness and compassion for others, ultimately you yourself will benefit more than you would otherwise. So sometimes I say that the wise selfish person should practice this way. Foolish selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is negative. Wise selfish people think of others, help others as much as they can, and the result is that they too receive benefit.”
12. Our present condition, if we use it skillfully and with wisdom, can be an inspiration to free ourselves from the bondage of suffering.
Whenever we act negatively, it leads to pain and suffering; whenever we act positively, it eventually results in happiness.
13. Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet.
14. For those who have led good lives, there is peace in death instead of fear.
15. Thomas Merton wrote: “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

1. The road to success us usually a pretty bumpy one. And there are no shortcuts.
2. Many people would define the “good life” as one that’s free of pain and hardship and heartache. But I’ve learned that adversity is actually an opportunity.
3. Find the positive out of every negative.
4. When you think negative thoughts, negative things usually happen. On the flip side, when you think positively and visualize success, that’s usually what you get.
5. You have to trust God to see the bigger picture. You have to choose to live from the heart and trust what you cannot see.
6. You can’t always determine your circumstances, but you can always determine your attitude.
Trust is the cornerstone of every meaningful relationship.
7. Adversity equals opportunity. The only way to believe that is to lift yourself up from the ground. Getting up is always the first step.
8. You’re going to face a situation where everything seems to be working against you and you have to fight through the adversity with all you’ve got.
9. If you want to do something you’ve never done, you have to prepare by doing something you’ve never done.
10. There aren’t any shortcuts on the path to success.
11. Adversity is not your enemy. It can unleash a power in your life that will make you stronger and help you achieve amazing things—things you may have never thought were possible…until now.
If I could sit down with you and have a face-to-face talk, these are some things I would say.
• Find a mentor. No matter who you are or what your profession is, we all need someone who can keep us grounded and speak truth into our lives. Find people who have built their lives on a solid foundation, and humble yourself to learn from them. I’ve never known a successful athlete, business person, or anyone else who has made an impact on the world who didn’t stand on the shoulders of other great men and women.
• Don’t give up. The worst thing that can happen in life is not getting knocked down and then staying down. If you lose a job, if your relationships crumble, if you face a health setback—get up. You may fall again and it may hurt, but get back on the horse. And once you’re up, hold your ground. Commitment is when you refuse to give yourself an excuse.
• Turn your defeats into triumphs. Any difficulty you face—whether it’s a tear to your shoulder, a person who betrays you, a dysfunctional family, or the bad luck you have with the economy—can unleash power within you for good. Use that negative to help you not only climb out of the hole you’re in, but rise to greater heights. The greatest opportunities in life are the ones that test us the most.
• Dream. If your mind can conceive it, you can achieve it. Not on your own, and not without struggle and hardship and effort. But when that vision mixes with hard work and commitment, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.
• Hope. In order to come back after a disappointment and accomplish something great, you have to believe in something bigger than yourself. But it’s not enough to just put your hope in hope. You have to have an object of hope. For me, God is the center of that hope, and I lean on him to order my steps and show me the right path. Having hope in the Lord means I trust in his plan and believe he’s never going to put anything in front of me that’s too hard to handle with his help.
• Be flexible. Be flexible enough to know when you’re being led in another direction, and then follow that new vision with all your heart. You are being led there for a reason—coincidence is usually God working anonymously.
• See adversity as an opportunity. No matter what comes your way, remember that God can use everything in your life for good, even though it may seem unfair or insurmountable at the time.
• Don’t be afraid of taking a few steps back. A step back is not necessarily a setback. Sometimes you have to take a few steps backward before you can get the momentum to jump over a chasm in your life.
• Don’t spectate—be ready. Instead of standing on the sidelines watching, spend that time getting ready for the next play. Too many of us are caught sleeping at life’s traffic lights. When the next opportunity comes your way, make sure you have prepared yourself well enough to seize the chance you’ve been given. You never know if you will get that opportunity again.
• Remember you are you. God created each one of us for a purpose. You will find that purpose in doing the small things well, in taking things one day at a time.
That purpose will always have an element of servings others.
When people think you’re not big enough, not smart enough, not wise enough, or not experienced enough for a task, remember that faith will carry you through. The test of adversity is one that’s fought with faith.
• Finish strong. It is not where you start in life, but rather how you finish. Keep it simple: in everything you do, make your last rep your best rep.